Why going home feels like a vacation to India’s elite trio of D Gukesh, R Praggnanandhaa and Arjun Erigaisi
In a recent clip uploaded on its social media handles, FIDE asked some of the top chess players in the world a simple question: if they could pick one vacation spot for the rest of their lives, what would it be?
Amidst the understandable replies like Greece, Bali, Havana, Switzerland, San Sebastian, Maldives and the Caribbean islands, the response from a trio of top Indian stars – D Gukesh, R Praggnanandhaa and Vaishali Rameshbabu – stands out.
“Home.”
It’s not a lack of imagination on the part of the Indians, nor are they reluctant travellers. On the contrary, so cramped are the jet-setting lives of India’s top chess players that being at home for them has begun to feel like a luxury.
“Nowadays going home feels like a vacation,” world champion Gukesh told FIDE in the interview with a smile.
He’s not exaggerating.
In just a three-month phase between August to October this year, Gukesh has flown from Spain (Granada Chess Open) to Poland (for an exhibition event against Jan Krystof Duda in Katowice) to the USA (for St Louis Rapid and Blitz in Missouri and then the Sinquefield Cup) to Uzbekistan (for FIDE Grand Swiss), to USA again (for Checkmate: USA vs India exhibition event in Arlington, Texas) to Greece (for the European Club Cup in Rhodes) to the US (for Clutch Chess: Champions Showdown event in St Louis) before playing in the FIDE World Cup in Goa.
After a short break, he’s in Mumbai playing at the Global Chess League (GCL) before he flies off to Qatar for the World Rapid and Blitz Championship, then returning to India to play at Kolkata’s Tata Steel Chess India Rapid and Blitz, where each day players play multiple games just like in every other rapid and blitz tournament. (The Global Chess League, in contrast, is just one game a day, occasionally two, which gives players plenty of breathing space.)
The year has also seen Gukesh make trips to the Netherlands for the Tata Steel Masters, Germany and France for Freestyle events, Romania for the Superbet Chess Classic, Norway for Norway Chess, and Croatia for the SuperUnited Rapid and Blitz.
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India’s other top players like Praggnanandhaa and Arjun Erigaisi are also racking up air miles as rapidly as Gukesh due to packed tournament calendars.
Pragg, for example, played in events at a breakneck pace through the year as he was chasing a Candidates spot through the FIDE Circuit route. That took him to Wijk aan Zee, Prague, Paris, Warsaw, Bucharest, Jermuk (Armenia), Tashkent, Zagreb, Las Vegas, Saint Louis, Samarkand (Uzbekistan), Sao Paulo and London. And then there were the World Cup and GCL for which he came to India. This calendar means that between late August and early October, the youngster played on three separate continents.
Right after his exit from the World Cup last month, he was on a flight to play in the London Classic before coming to Mumbai and will play in the World Rapid and Blitz, Tata Steel Kolkata and Tata Steel Wijk aan Zee before competing at the Candidates tournament in Cyprus in March-April.
“I’ve hardly been home this year. At the most, I get two weeks at home. To me, that’s not really a break, because by the time you feel relaxed, another tournament is there and you have to start playing. I would like a much longer break,” Pragg says.
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“Even after winning the UzChess Cup in Tashkent (on June 28), I had to leave immediately. I’d played for seven hours on the final day, because it was a morning round. I played a classical game, then had to fight it out in the tie-breaks, then there was a closing ceremony. By the time I got to the room, I was dead. But I still had to pack immediately to fly out. But all this is part of what we do,” he shrugs.
His good friend Erigaisi would agree. After his defeat to Wei Yi in the quarters of the FIDE World Cup, he gave himself a break of 10 days at home before flying off to Jerusalem for a tournament and then to South Africa for the Freestyle Chess season finale. That done, he’s flown to Mumbai to play in the GCL. Afterwards, just like Gukesh, Arjun and Pragg, he will be on a flight to Qatar for the World Rapid and Blitz, then off to Kolkata for the Tata Steel Chess tournament.
No time to breathe
Occasionally, this means flying out on the day a tournament ends.
“After the Jerusalem tournament ended, I had to fly the same night because there were some Freestyle Chess activities from the next day itself in South Africa,” Erigaisi says, describing a 13-hour journey, involving a flight from Tel Aviv to Addis Ababa and from there to South Africa.
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After the Freestyle event, Erigaisi was on a flight to Mumbai the next day itself to play in the GCL.
“But that flight had many chess players,” he smiles.
Ask him how many days on average he plays in tournaments, and Erigaisi estimates just over half of the year. And that, he points out, is a lower workload from the phase between June 2021 and June 2022 when he was playing in tournaments for about 200 days.
Ask him if there are ideas like ‘workload management’ in chess, just like in other sports, and he shrugs: “At least now that I’m still young, fatigue hasn’t happened. It’s also why we all realise that fitness is one of the important goals for us. It’s one of the reasons why Magnus Carlsen is still so good at 35 and Vishy sir is doing so well at 56.”
Gukesh too shrugs off any talk of mental fatigue. When asked by FIDE at the World Cup why he he had chosen to play in an exhibition event in the USA, that too in rapid and blitz, just before he had to play in a classical World Cup on the other side of the world, with issues like jet lag to contend with, he replied: “I was telling myself, if I don’t push myself at this age, when am I going to push myself?”
